IBM has today presented various new versions of their G5 processor at the Power Everywhere Forum in Japan. Firstly, it introduced the much-anticipated PowerPC 970MP, the dual-core version of the G5. In addition, they also announced 3 low-power G5s, ranging from 1.2Ghz at 13W to 1.6Ghz at 16W. These processors will most likely find their way into Apple's Macs.

Actually, the current dual-core processors from AMD give each processor a dedicated L2, and allow them to communicate at high-speed over the on-chip SRQ (system request queue). Having dedicated L2 caches has some advantages, in that it allows greater bandwidth per processor, and easier scalability to quad core configurations. It also has some disadvantages, namely more cacheline ping-ponging when both processors are working on the same data.